Running Win 2k Pro with Asus P5SD2-X motherboard

My computer uses the Asus P5SD2-X motherboard and was supplied with Windows XP Home. Windows 2000 Professional was not an option of operating system given by the computer supplier.

I am trying to use Win 2000 Pro on this computer and am only having one problem. There are a very small number of errors when reading and writing files from the hard disk drives.

I have installed Service Pack 4 and also Update Rollup 1.

I have one IDE drive and one SATA 1 drive installed.

The error rate is very small indeed. If transferring over 100 gigabytes of data in one go just one or two files might be corrupted and even then just one or two bytes in each file would be different. Interesting to note is that very often the difference in values between the two corresponding bytes is precisely one, far more often then would happen by random chance.

There is strong evidence to suggest errors can occur when reading the hard disks rather than writing them. If a file compare program such as ‘testpath’ is used to compare two sets of files it could give one set of error messages on one run and then give different error messages on a subsequent run. This is without any write operation having been performed to the files concerned between the two comparisons being made.

I had a look on the Asus web site and in the user forum one person had asked about SATA drivers for use with Windows 2000 Professional for the motherboard concerned. The reply given by Asus was that Windows XP supplies the necessary drivers and therefore the drivers issue could be resolved by changing the operating system from Windows 2000 Professional to Windows XP.

I tried installing Windows XP Home (clean install) and there seemed to be some improvement with the SATA 1 drive but not with the IDE drive.

The data cable I am using for the IDE drive is the ribbon type and is not shielded.

However I did not like XP and changed back to Win 2k Pro (clean install). Of course the slight read/write issues still continue with the hard disk drives.

I am thinking of two possible solutions. One would be to obtain third party drivers that would enable me to use the Asus P5SD2-X motherboard with Win 2k Pro without the problems when reading and writing the hard disk drives as described above.

Can anyone recommend any likely sources of third party drivers that might solve my problems?

A second ‘fix’ would be to obtain a third party ‘explorer’ that always makes an independent verification of any move or copy operation and automatically re-tries any such operation that does not verify correctly. I am sure I heard of such a program in the past but cannot remember the name.

Does anyone know which program this is – or any other program with the same verification capabilities?